


Thieves, Swords and Rainbows

by orphan_account



Category: Durarara!!
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-20
Updated: 2010-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-13 20:44:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,787
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/141557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There're rainbows, a missing uniform, a dead thief and of course, the rumor mill in Ikebukuro.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Thieves, Swords and Rainbows

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Chichirinoda](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chichirinoda/gifts).



> Thanks to Allie for the last minute beta; you are the proverbial life-saver only slightly less hollow in the middle.

_Two-seven-six.  Three-five.  Nine._

Tranquil.  A calm island.  A summer-lit glen with only the slightest breeze stirring the air.  The empty abyss.

Heiwajima Shizuo stared at the safe, and then stared at it some more.  A lotus blossom, floating on a pond.  A fog bank, gently scraping a mountaintop.

 _Two.  Seven. Six.  Three.  Five._ Nine.

The numbers beeped as he entered them, and the lights on the keypad flashed, but the safe didn’t open.  The stillness in the air after a storm has passed.  The smell of sunshine in a summer meadow.

With a roar, he ripped the safe loose from the wall, sending plaster and bolts flying everywhere, and held it above his head.  “You goddamn metal—” he screamed as he brought it crashing down on the floor again and again.  “Why won’t you—”

Eventually, the safe did give up its treasure.

So what if Celty’s way hadn’t worked?  Shizuo could solve problems too.

-

“Russian sushi!  Your stomach will probably survive!  Try some Russian sushi!  Tolerably fresh!  Not the worst thing you will ever—Eh?!  Shizuo!”

Simon Brezhnev had seen many things in his many years, ranging from a kitten attacking a shark to a headless woman who was still able to walk and fight and ride motorbikes.  He’d even seen a man single-handedly swing a lamppost through a crowd of criminals, so what was happening in front of him wasn’t exactly new.

“Shizuo!” he shouted as he leapt to catch the lamppost before it hit a little girl.  “What are you doing?  Violence is not the answer!”

“It is this time!” Shizuo screamed back.  Simon had never seen him so furious: his face rage-reddened and framed by particularly unkempt hair, his eyes black with madness.  “WHERE IS IT?!”  Then he drew his arm back to punch Simon and the crowd took two collective steps back. 

Shizuo was fast, and he was strong, but not fast or strong enough that Simon couldn’t catch that punch and then duck under it, tossing the bartender down to the ground in a neat judo flip. 

Normally that sort of thing was enough to bring Shizuo back to his senses but this time Shizou only screamed wordlessly and struggled back to his feet.  “Who… took… it?” he pants, swaying a bit as he lurches about, and Simon wondered if maybe that judo flip hadn’t been as neat as it looked.  Either Shizuo had hit his head on the way down, or the kid had finally come unhinged. 

To answer Simon’s unspoken question, Shizuo started running toward him, all smooth movement and murderous focus.  Unhinged it was, then.

With a smooth efficiency, Simon twisted to the side to let Shizuo run past, then reached out and grabbed the back of the other man’s belt and collar.  “Now, Shizuo,” he said, “are you going to calm down or am I going to have to sit on you until you stop trying to hurt people.”

“WHO TOOK IT?!” Shizuo screamed in response.

Simon threw him to the ground and sat on him until Shizuo stopped trying to get up.

-

Celty could always sense death.  She was a Dullahan and every Celtic fairy was a death fairy in the end.  Even though there was no corpse among them, she could feel death radiating from the men at the park.  It had settled into the folds of their jackets and the treads of their shoes.

Death was everywhere, though.  People carried it on them and in them wherever they went, tracking it about like mud on a carpet.  Four men with downcast faces who had recently seen death were nothing particularly unique.  She didn’t stop for them.  She stopped for the utter wrongness that lingered in the park.  Her heart raced and if she’d drawn breath, her breath would have quickened.  Aliens?  She tamped down hard on that thought, but couldn’t quite prevent it from surfacing.

There was no one else near, though.  Just Celty and the four men: red-haired, brown-haired, black-haired and no-haired.

“Poor Yuuta,” the brown-haired one said, his face and voice tired and sad but not exactly hollowed by grief.  “Only in town for a month and already dead.”

“Hard to believe,” the others chorused.

“Do we know what happened?”

Celty felt the bald man scowl.  “I know,” he said.  “I told him this was coming, as soon as I saw him sneaking around, carrying that bartender’s uniform.  I told him, leave town while you still can, before Heiwajima Shizuo catches up to you.  Of all the people in Ikebukuro, I told him, Shizuo’s the last one you want to steal from.  Turns out that bastard didn’t just ignore me when I talked about the late rent, he ignored me no matter what I said.”

“Some people,” the others agreed.

“Poor Yuuta,” the red-haired man said.  “One day, you’re riding high; the next, Heiwajima Shizuo’s thrown you so hard you get stuck in the middle of a tree and bleed to death from the splinters.”

Black-haired man nodded.  “That’s how it goes.  Poor Yuuta.”

To Celty, the conversation she overheard as she walked past was no less strange and _wrong_ than the feeling creeping down her spine.

-

 _Yuuta?  Who’s that?_

 _I think he was a thief of some sort.  That chubby guy who was trying to peddle stolen medicines a while back?  That’s the guy._

 _That one?  That’s the guy who broke into Shizuo’s apartment?_

 _I heard that he was with Blue Square and this was some type of revenge prank._

 _No, I heard Yuuta was in the Dollars._

 _No, no, you’re both wrong.  He was unaligned and trying to start up his own gang and breaking into Shizuo’s apartment was just his way of showing off and attracting top talent._

 _Someone told me he was a medical researcher and was planning to kidnap Shizuo so he could experiment._

 _He had to have had super strength too, to try to fight Shizuo._

 _I’m surprised Ikebukuro is still standing!  I heard their battle was epic, and it was almost too close to call._

 _Didn’t you hear?  Akihabara is in ruins._

 _I bet it is.  I can’t believe Poor Yuuta was stupid enough to challenge Shizuo._

 _Yeah._

 _Shizuo always wins._

-

<Did you do it?>

Celty had never liked the skinny information broker in the jacket lined with white fur: he reminded her too much of Shinra.  Both of them liked to cut people up to see what was inside – sometimes quite literally—but Shinra did it so he could learn to put things back together again.  Izaya did it for fun and never cared about putting things right.  If she’d been able to avoid it, she wouldn’t be in this alley, typing questions at him, but somehow she doesn’t think either Shinra or Shizuo would be able to get what they need.

He just looked at her, standing with her PDA shoved in his face, and gave his laugh.  “Do what?”

Celty knew that laugh, though.  It was the laugh she’d learned to associate with him lying and keeping secrets and wreaking havoc: in other words, his normal laugh.

 <Who killed that thief in Ikebukuro?> Celty typed.

“Ahhh,” Izaya breathed, looking crafty.  Celty didn’t particularly trust his crafty look, because he was crafty all the time and the look only meant his face had gotten bored with its last expression.  “I heard about that.  That little twerp, stuck in a tree?  Word on the street says Shizuo lost his temper and went overboard.  I knew it was going to happen one day.”  Izaya clucked his tongue disapprovingly.  “I’ve warned people over and over again about how dangerous he can be, but you know how people just won’t—“

Celty held up a hand to cut him off, and to her surprise, he stopped talking.  <Shizuo was with me that night.>

“Maybe he killed Yuuta after he left.” 

<He was with me all night.>

And then Izaya’s eyes lit up at the implications and Celty cursed at herself.  Giving Izaya anything to work with never ended well and he’d run with that, even if he ran to the wrong conclusions.

<Not like that.  I made miso.  The miso made him sick.>  Normally, Celty would have minded that Izaya bunched up his face and doubled over laughing.  She would have especially minded that Izaya’s laugh sounded _normal_ for once, a genuinely amused sound rising from his throat.  Normally, she would have minded, but today, she was tired and a little bit scared and as long as she wasn’t a potential target in his vendetta against Shizuo then she would put off being offended.

“For that,” he gasped through his laughter, “I have something for you:  Tsunekawa Keiichi is the man who killed Yuuta.”

-

 _I had the weirdest dream last night: I was just falling through a field of rainbows._

 _I had a dream too, about rainbows hitting mountains and then the mountains breaking._

 _Really?  I had a dream about a sword that left a rainbow trail whenever someone swung it._

 _Must be something in the water._

 _Maybe that weird guy with the gas mask dumped something in it again._

-

That night, Celty and Shizuo sat and watched Shinra eat (Shizuo had declined Celty’s latest miso attempt – “Tom and Simon made me eat sushi before I came over here,” he’d said, not sounding particularly upset).

“Hey, Shizuo,” Shinra said.  “Is this a new hairstyle?  It looks good, I guess, but why’d you change it?”

“I can’t find my hairbrush,” Shizuo said.  “I thought I was coming over because you said you knew who killed the guy who stole my clothes.”

<His name is Tsunekawa Keiichi.  I’ve been asking around on the message boards, but no one seems to know who he is.>

“Oh, I know who Tsunekawa Keiichi is,” Shinra said, slurping his soup happily.  “You should have said earlier, Celty.  I read all of his papers when I was trying to study Shizuo.  He’s a medical researcher who does some fascinating stuff on adrenaline and its effects on muscle function – oh!”

<What?>

“Well, I’m not exactly a criminal mastermind,” Shinra said, “but I think it goes something like this: Tsunekawa hears about Shizuo and moves back here from Belfast in order to study him.  Then he realizes that Shizuo is Shizuo, and even his friends don’t get to study him very much, so he gets Yuuta to steal his stuff, probably including his hairbrush, so that he can have genetic material to use.  Then he kills Yuuta to cover it up!”

Shizuo and Celty stared at him.

<That’s both entirely obvious and also makes no sense.>

“Why wouldn’t he have just asked me to be in his experiments?”

“What would you have said?”

“I’d have said, ‘No way!’ and probably punched him.”

“Well then—”

<Is Shizuo internationally famous and we just don’t know it?>

“I don’t—”

“And why would somebody steal my dirty laundry?  My brother gave me those clothes!”

“Maybe the sweat?  I don’t know.  Shizuo, don’t get angry!”

<Wait.>

<He was from Ireland?>

Obviously relieved in the somewhat change in subject, Shinra turned to Celty.  “Yes!  He moved there to work, but I could tell it was also because it was such a, you know, romantic place.  He’s a very poetic soul, you know.  He writes poetry about rainbows.”

“Rainbows?”  Shizuo said, in his dangerously calm voice.  “He’s a poetic soul who writes about rainbows?”  Calmly, he reached over and grabbed a chopstick from next to Shinra.  He snapped the chopstick.  He dropped the chopstick.  He ground the chopstick under his shoe.  _“THAT’S THE STUPIDEST THING I’VE EVER HEARD!”_

It was thanks to years of experience with Shizuo’s temper, as well as Celty’s supernatural reflexes, that Shinra’s apartment was not totally destroyed just then.  Instead, it was left with minor cosmetic damage that Shinra was forced to attend to while Shizuo and Celty bonded.

<Have you tried visualization exercises?>

“What?” asked Shizuo.

<Think of calming things.  Imagine that you are calm.  When you start to get angry, count to a hundred before you do anything.>

The three of them sat silent in the ruins of the room for a moment.  “Celty, that’s not how my anger works,” Shizuo finally said.  “I don’t really know I’m getting angry until I _am_ angry, and when I am angry, it’s hard to stop.”

“I really liked that couch,” said Shinra, looking mournfully at the rubble.  “I really liked that wall, too.”

Eventually, Shizuo agreed to at least try.  It was hardly the first time that he’d promised to try to control his temper, and it probably wouldn’t be the last, but just like every other time, he really meant it.  The conversation turned from Tsunekawa, then, and Shizuo’s missing clothes, and drifted easily after that.

-

 

 _Did you hear, they found another body tonight?_

 _One of the old men?_

 _The police are saying they were all natural causes, but every night there’s a new one in the same spot, down by the drains._

 _Is it another serial killer?_

 _Of course it is!  There have been dozens of deaths in the last few nights!_

 _Hundreds of people are dying!  Who’s doing this?_

 _Maybe it’s the Black Rider._

 _Maybe it’s that weird guy with the gas mask._

 _Maybe it’s Nebula._

-

<Did you feel that?>

“The draft?” asked Shizuo.  “I can close the window if you want.”

<No.  There’s something else here.  Something is very wrong.>

And as much as she liked Shinra, Celty was glad that it was Shizuo who was standing next to her, leaning out the window.  Shinra would have analyzed it, asking her to describe how she was sensing it and what the feeling meant.  Shizuo just accepted it. 

-

“We think it’s in a safe in his lab,” Kadota told Shizuo, three days later.  “Or at least that’s what the security guard told Erika and Walker.”

Shizuo didn’t ask how they’d found out.  The last time he’d talked to Erika, she’d shouted something about a true love rivalry and then been tackled by all three of her friends.  Now she was sitting across the street in a van, and it looked like Walker and Togusa were holding her down.  Weird people.

“A safe?” he asked vaguely.  Opening safes required fiddly combinations and stethoscopes and patience, from what he remembered.  Maybe he could borrow a stethoscope from Shinra, but the other two might be beyond him.

“A safe,” Kadota nodded, then grinned.  “And while he was telling those two about it, he also may have mentioned the combination.  Hey, Shizuo?  If you want, we’ll help you get it back.”

-

 _Hey, listen!  Last night I saw the person who’s been killing the old men!_

 _Really?!_

 _He was this huge man, bigger than Shizuo or that Russian at the sushi joint, even, and he was carrying a body with him, over his shoulders and then he dumped the body down near the storm drains!_

-

 _Two-seven-six-three-five-nine._

The combination, Shizuo thought as security guards flooded the room, hadn’t worked.  That was irritating.  So was the fact that someone had tricked him.  So was the fact that his suit hadn’t been in the safe.  There’d been a sword in there instead that, while pretty and sharp, had absolutely not heft to it. 

“Come and get me, you bastards!” he shouted as he discarded the sword in favor of a heavy marble-topped table.  Three or four of them did just that, one of them even trying to reach for the sword before a table leg caught him in the temple.  The rest, residents of Ikebukuro and full of common sense, families to care for and a realization of just how wonderful it was to be alive, suddenly realized that there were probably forms and procedures that had to be done before confronting a situation like this one, and if there weren’t, _maybe there should be_.

-

When it was over, about a minute later, Shizuo took the sword with him. It seemed like the thing to do, and besides, his mother had always lectured them whenever they’d left knives sitting about.  Someone could get hurt.

So he picked up the sword and climbed over the rubble and the moaning people in it and went in search of Celty and Kadota’s gang.

“Damn sword,” he mumbled.  “Damn rubble.  Damn idiot under the rubble, stop moving so I can climb over you!” 

Celty and the gang were waiting for him near the entrance to the now thoroughly deserted building with a chubby old man.  The chubby old man had been tied up rather thoroughly, and Walker was sitting on him.  What was it with those people?

“You bastard!  You’ll never get away with this!  Kaoru will rescue me!” the old man was screaming, but Shizuo ignored him in favor of Celty.  The Dullahan’s body was twisted with agitation, her limbs coiling and uncoiling around each other.

<Caladcholg?!>

“Eh?”

<I know that sword!  Wait, why is it here?>

Behind her, Walker and Erika leaned in toward each other.  “What’s she saying?” Erika asked.

“Dunno.  Can’t read it either.”

-

Hundreds of years ago, when Celty had still carried her head all around Ireland and all the other Celtic fairies and heroes had roamed the land freely, everyone knew about Caladcholg.  The sword and the stories had been old even then, dating back to the time of the legends’ legends.

Caladcholg could slice the tops off mountains.  It left a rainbow of light in its wake whenever it was swung.  Only the strongest of men could wield it.

No wonder she’d felt that creeping feeling of wrong all over the city.  Another supernatural thing from Ireland, it was close enough to call to her, but it was made of rage and rainbows and light.  So similiar, but also her complete opposite. 

<Why is it here?> she asked Tsunekawa, but the scientist just turned his head and shouted some more.  “Kaoru!  Where are you, you lazy ass?!  A rescue would be nice!”

Celty felt the man coming, in thudding footsteps and white hot rage, long before he actually got to the building.  When he finally arrived, Kaoru didn’t disappoint.  He was tall: taller than Shizuo and more than twice as broad, and the only reason no one would say his muscles had muscles was because there was no room for them, what with all the muscles.

“I’m back,” he grunted at Tsunekawa, seemingly oblivious to the fact that his boss had been tied up and held by a pack of hooligans.

“Who the hell are you?” Shizuo asked, his body going into what everybody recognized as ‘fight mode.’  “And where is it?”

“Oh, this is epic!” Erika shouted as Shizuo dropped the sword to grab the front desk, which he hurled it at Kaoru.  “Two mighty giants fighting it out!  Shizuo versus—who are you again?”

“Kaoru,” the man said, narrowly ducking a roundhouse kick from Shizuo.  “I don’t really know what’s going on here, either!  I woke up this morning looking like this and then the old man made me kidnap a junkie and then dump a corpse near the storm drains.  Can you please stop hitting me?”  The last was directed at Shizuo, who paid him no notice.

<You’re trying to make someone strong enough to wield Caladcholg for you, aren’t you?> Celty asked Tsunekawa.  The scientist nodded in assent.  <But whatever you’re dosing them with isn’t working, because no one’s using the sword.>

“They’re all too weak,” Tsunekawa muttered.  “And they keep dying.  I’m trying to perfect the dosage, but changing their metabolism like that keeps aging them too quickly.  I need better quality materials.”

Celty felt a bit sick.  <Humans are not materials!>  Then she felt sicker as she thought of something.  <You’re making them kidnap their replacements, and then when you change them, you’re making them dispose of the bodies of the predecessors.>  If she’d been able to glance, she would have glanced with pity at Kaoru, now running desperately, obviously trying to find a place to hide.

“I don’t care about any of this!  Why don’t you people start talking about what I care about?!”  screamed Shizuo.  “WHERE IS IT?!” 

Tsunekawa just looked at him blankly.  “Where is what?”

Celty had seen many things happen that would eventually become legends.  She was a legendary creature herself.  Still, the punch Shizuo delivered just then was one she knew she’d be telling the story of for ages.  The building shook from the sonic boom as Shizuo’s fist met Tsunekawa’s body, and the scientist was lifted up like a rag and sent flying.  And then flying some more.

“Wow,” Erika said as they peered through the holes the building’s walls at Tsunekawa, now landed in a heap outside the rear of the building.  “This is just like—”

“No,” said Kadota, “it really isn’t.”

“Um,” Kaoru said, raising his hand rather timidly.  “What is it you’re looking for?”

<Shizuo’s bartender uniform.>

“Ah,” he said.  “I think I saw it hanging downstairs in the basement.”

-

“Damn irritating little scientist.  Damn irritating big lunk—Downstairs in the basement?!”  Shizuo shook his head angrily.  “WHY DIDN’T YOU JUST SAY THAT IN THE FIRST PLACE?!  I HATE IT WHEN PEOPLE DON’T JUST TELL YOU WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW!  AND OW!  WHO LEFT THIS SWORD SITTING AROUND SO I COULD STEP ON IT?!”

And as Shizuo picked up the sword from the ground, he thought  of a butterfly hovering in a meadow.  He thought of waves, lapping against a sandy shore.  He thought of a rainbow.  Rainbows—

“Shizuo, that sword levels mountains!  Don’t swing it while we’re still in the building!”

-

<This still doesn’t make sense.> Celty typed as they limped out of the remnants of the building.  .  <Why did Tsunekawa come back to Japan?  How did he hear about you?>

<Wait.>

<Do you have Caladcholg?>

“No.”  That was a stupid question, and from anyone other than Celty, it would have been really irritating, but Celty was like Tom: she was calming, rather than annoying.  Besides, he had his suit back.

<If you don’t have the sword, and I don’t have the sword, then where did it go to?>

There was that.  Shizuo didn’t care about that, really.  He didn’t need to know everything about everyone.  He didn’t mind that there were things that he didn’t know because knowing everything —

For a moment, high above them, the twilight sun flashed on white fur, and before he even knew it, Shizuo was ripping a bus bench from the ground and throwing it up through a window, fifteen stories high.  Then he was grinning, which was rather absurd because he was furious, and running as fast as he could to build up momentum for the jump—

There were worse things in the world than not knowing everything.

 


End file.
